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Bush's lethal legacy to the Palestinians
Notwithstanding widespread hopes that US President-Barack Obama will save the Middle East from itself, it is increasingly evident that it might will be beyond anyone's powers to soon repair the damage wrought by eight years of George W. Bush. Regardless of how committed Obama may (or may not) prove to be, the fact remains that many of the conditions necessary for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are neither present nor close at hand. The Hamas-Fatah feud makes one side too divided to either negotiate a full and fair agreement or properly implement one, and Israel's voters apparently feel so guilty at having been led by Ehud Olmert that they look set to engage in mass self-flagellation by electing Benjamin Netanyahu, an avowed foe of the entire peace process. All of this threatens to extend the Palestinians' seemingly interminable season of dispossession. My own unease over this state of affairs is piqued by the evident satisfaction that some commentators - particularly American neoconservatives but also some of their fellow travelers in the Middle East - are taking at something that ought to unnerve any reasonable individual. These suggest (as they always have) that Arabs don't (and shouldn't) care all that much about the Palestinian cause, argue tacitly that peace is not even worth pursuing until Arab states have democratized, and peddle the familiar line that Hamas is irrevocably hostile to a negotiated solution. To be fair, the records of the neocons and their minions make such positions virtually unavoidable unless they are to abandon even the pretense of consistency. Their cheerleading for George W. Bush's illegal and immoral war in Iraq leaves no option but to deny the Palestinians their rights until each of their cousins has had a Magna Carta moment. And their ritual denunciations of political Islam, absent similar scorn for things like Christian fundamentalism and Zionism, close all avenues but those leading to a classic Catch-22: The Arabs have to embrace democracy soon or the Islamists will take over, but if the Arabs embrace democracy, the Islamists will take over even sooner. Posted by: Fred 2008-12-13 |
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